In Conversation: Diane Severin Nguyen & X Zhu-Nowell

This event is free.

In person at Faris Family Studio at The Dance Centre
Registration required
Register here

Join artist Diane Severin Nguyen and curator X Zhu-Nowell for a talk on the occasion of Nguyen’s exhibition, If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s, at the Contemporary Art Gallery and a Featured Exhibition for Capture 2024.

This talk is co-presented by the Contemporary Art Gallery and Capture Photography Festival, with support from the Province of B.C.

If you would like to make a donation to support Capture Photography Festival, please donate via our registered charitable organization Vancouver Association for Photographic Arts here. Amounts greater than $20.00 will receive a tax receipt.

About the Participants

Diane Severin Nguyen works with photography, video and installation. Through material and sculptural experimentations, Nguyen approaches the photographic moment as one of transformation. The artist is particularly interested in exceeding photography as a mode of documentation, and engages with it rather as a set of conditions shaped by desire and speculation. Her video work narrativizes these tensions by examining the histories of power, victimhood and forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making. She has exhibited her work internationally, in places like SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, Rockbund Art Museum, MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Schinkel Pavilion, Jeu du Paume, the Hammer Museum, and many others. Her films have been screened at film festivals such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berlinale. Nguyen is a recent recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim fellowship and lives and works in New York.

X Zhu-Nowell is a curator, writer and institutional leader with an international presence, operating primarily between Shanghai and New York. They are the Artistic Director at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. Their innovative curatorial approach is exemplified in the museum’s 2023 program, which was centered around solo exhibitions and new commissions from six artists from Asia and its diaspora: WangShui, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Tosh Basco, Diane Severin Nguyen, Shubigi Rao, and Tan Jing. From 2014 to 2022, X Zhu-Nowell was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where their exhibition Wu Tsang: Anthem was celebrated as the best exhibition of 2021 by the New York Times. In 2022, they co-organized the 6th Asian Art Council meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, collaborating with artist Kandis Williams to explore themes of dispossession and hybridity within curatorial practices and the white cube.